Origins 2

In 2017 the expanded spacewatch began making detailed surveys for objects beyond the orbit of Jupiter. In it's first year of operation it managed to locate small asteroids and comets missed by earlier surveys and even a few lost spacecraft. There were, of course, some mysterious objects but perhaps the most unusual, designated 2019JC3, received very little immediate scrutiny. Spectral observations of 2019JC3 suggested high amounts of carbon, titanium, and aluminum on the surface of the object.

It was large, highly reflective, and tumbling through a 10,000 year orbit. No known celestial bodies matched this profile and no human devices should be where this object was. Even more strange was that it moved with the speed of a comet and was headed for the inner solar system.

Then, in the late fall of 2020, astronomers with the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) detected a strange faint signal almost lost in the background. Triangulation studies suggested the object was within the solar system and so it was dismissed as yet another piece of human space junk. The story would have ended there were it not for the curiosity of a young graduate student.

In 2022 Cassandra Bradley was conducting a survey of interplanetary spacecraft debris when she came across the 2019JC3 data. When she cross referenced her data with several other archives including SETI, she noticed some unusual properties.

"2019JC3 was putting out a signal....Dead rockets never signal home!" she wrote in her autobiography, "I got a strange feeling about this debris. So many things about it did not add up. It was too far out to be a regular rocket body, it seemed too large to be a lost probe, and the orbit was all wrong. I knew I was going to need to make some direct observations to confirm what this thing really was. The tricky part would be getting some instrument time for what some of my colleagues were calling 'Cassie's Caper'"

The clues were adding up to an amazing conclusion and a dangerous confrontation.